Friday, November 04, 2011

Only Governments Can Dictate Peak Oil

People talk about peak oil, but there is also peak government take. How much more can the governments take? Look at Libya; it was taking more than 97% of oil proceeds. In Iraq, it's somewhere north of 92%. A company, after taking on all the exploration risk, gets about $4 for every $80 per barrel (bbl) in Iraq. That's a high government take. The risks are there. _MarketOracle

The capricious actions of governments can make it difficult for energy companies to produce their product. From the energy starvation agenda of the US Obama agenda, to the neglectful maintenance of oil field equipment by national oil companies in the middle east, Mexico, Venzuela, and Russia, governments tend to have an adverse effect on the production of oil, gas, bitumens, coal, kerogens, nuclear power, and virtually all forms of energy.

The big themes that dominated the opening years of the century (prosperity, markets, peak oil, global warming and clean technology) are giving way to a different set of concerns centred on inequality, affordability, regulation and techniques for extracting oil and gas from tight rock formations and ever-deeper below the surface.

...A decade of soaring real oil prices is at last beginning to transform the long-neglected supply side of the industry, encouraging widespread employment of technologies such as ultra-deepwater drilling and hydraulic fracturing to extend conventional oil and gas reserves.

...At the root of all these issues are political rather than economic questions. There will be no shortage of oil, gas or power in the next two decades. _Reuters

Advanced societies need to turn away from leftist-Green policies of energy starvation, and take advantage of the reprieve from energy shortages which they are being granted. If nations refuse to build safe new advanced nuclear power systems while they have the chance, their shrinking future generations will suffer for their green dieoff.orgy stupidity.

But the nations that do learn to build the safe new modular reactors in large numbers, using new generation technologies which allow them to burn nuclear "waste" as valuable fuels -- those nations will be able to leverage the abundant power and process heat from new nuclear, into centuries' worth of hydrocarbons for whatever use they choose to make of them.

Real peak oil is political peak oil. That is the only meaningful kind of peak oil that you will ever see. The way to doom is by way of government policy.

The mainstream of peak oil doom is a cult, a way to kill time for those with nothing important or productive to do. If these believers were problem solving people, they would be solving problems rather than circling and jerkling in their echo choirs.

Of course, the leaders of the cult are able to prosper from the gullibility of the true believers, but such opportunism is to be expected. Likewise the political leaders who institute government policies of political peak oil and political energy starvation -- they will prosper from having done what their backers wanted them to do. They will get their backdoor payoffs. But again, opportunism and greed in high places has always been the norm.